A game made in Scratch when I was 10. You drag Doofus, a little dog, around the screen to hunt down monster alien doodles. A monster orb in the middle shoots laser bolts at you the whole time. That's the game. It's not that complicated.
I called it Doofus Space Hunter...
Built alone in Scratch. Just the stuff I learnt in Digi-Tech.
I didn't learn much technically from this one. But looking back, this is where the interest started. Something about sitting down and making a thing, even a really boring thing, and having it actually run. That feeling stuck around even when I quit and came back and quit again.
Doofus Space Hunter is the foundation.
An interactive 3D scene of the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland, Australia. Click any mountain and an info panel opens — how hard it is to climb, whether it's open, what dangers to watch out for, whether it's safe.
It's meant to be genuinely useful. Not just a pretty scene — actual information for anyone thinking about heading out there.
Built with a friend named Ally. She handled the JavaScript, the 3D scene, the interactions, the info panels (the hard part :|). I handled the HTML and CSS. Watching what she could pull off with code was honestly the thing that made me want to get good at this.
I didn't know that a project like this was possible before we built it.
This project is a big part of why billy-bit.com exists. It gave me hope that one day I could build something as cool as what Ally did with the JavaScript. I'm not there yet, but I enjoyed every part of making this, and that feeling is what keeps me going.
It's a library of all the Apple Shortcuts I made. Some of them are personal or exclusive to my devices but I've included most of them and I will keep updating the website.
Shortcuts are honestly what got me back into coding. My friend Walter (yo@walterck.com) showed me all the impressive things he did with shortcuts and even though I can't compete with that, it still inspired me to make my own projects that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Some of these shortcuts require an automation to harness their full potential. To set up an automation, open the Shortcuts app. On the bottom of your screen, there will be a menu with three buttons: "Library", "Automation", "Gallery". Click on "Automation". In the top right corner there is a plus sign, click on it. There will be a menu full of different triggers, select a trigger that you want to trigger a shortcut. For example, Message trigger for Message Logger. I will specify which trigger is optimal within the description. Once you select a trigger, there will be another menu with all your shortcuts, select which one you want to run with the trigger. Now your automation is set up!
The main apps I used for the shortcuts are Actions, Shortcuts, Toolbox Pro, Data Jar, Device Monitor, and a few smart home apps that I use. These will change for each user so I have not included smart home shortcuts.
The Shortcuts app gets cluttered fast. Long press any shortcut to move it into a folder. I'd recommend organising yours into the same categories featured on this page. Takes two minutes and makes everything way easier to find.
Got something specific in mind that isn't here? I build custom shortcuts on request, so get in touch and we can work something out. Contact me at billy-bit@outlook.com or contact@billy-bit.com.
Billy Bot is a local voice assistant. It runs in a loop on a Raspberry Pi. Basically the core functionality is: It listens for the wakeword "billy" right now then follows commands. It listens for keywords in the commands such as "weather" to pull commands out of natural sentences.
In the code is a long if/else statement chain with all the commands. I think this is honestly a really good alternative to an ai as it takes exponentially less memory and storage.
The code is written in python.
The code is run on a Raspberry Pi 24/7 with a speaker playing the output and a usb mic recieving input.
This is the first thing I built that actually sits there and works. Not a website. Not a shortcut. A physical thing that responds when I talk to it. That shift from "this should work" to "this does work" is what made the whole project worth it. Making my first physical project really motivated me, like I've reached a new level in my code journey.
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